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Ken Burns & Michael Moore Present: Fahrenheit 1861 »
November 30, 2005
The 'Verse's Tiniest Solar System (Minus the Sol)
A brown star, as far as I understand it, is a gas-giant planet that never accretes enough mass to collapse into the fusion-reactors we know as actual stars. It's a would-be star that never caught fire, in other words. Sort of like Liz Phair.
I don't know if Jupiter is technically a "brown star," but Carl Sagan referred to it as "a star that failed." If only it could have gotten a little bit bigger and maybe pulled in some of Saturn's mass into it... we could have two suns, just like Luke Skywalker did on Tatooine. And how freakin' cool would that be?
And yes, I'm posting this not for the astronomical novelty of it, but chiefly for the potential Google-hits for "brown star." I'd prefer not to explain.
Thanks to Glen.